When Startups Go Wrong

The other day I stumbled across the IM-based task managment service called IMified. Their elevator pitch is that their servers use IM as an interface, so you can leave notes and reminders for yourself or schedule appointments through Google Calendar just by IMing a special agent.

The problem is, it doesn't really work out so well. There's a "new" interface for Blogger that's only about 8 months old that the IMified developers haven't gotten around to implementing, so there's no love trying to blog through IMified.

OK, maybe it's asking too much to think that a company that offers a service will keep up to date on every last little interactivity bit with every third party service they claim to support.

But their internal offerings are top notch, right? Negatory.

You can pretty easily set a reminder in IMified. "Hey, repeat back to me 'go get some eggs at the store' at 2 PM," you tell IMified by means of their numerical interface.

In theory, anyway, you should then get an IM of your own at the determined time. Too bad that doesn't work, either.

"Hey," I said this morning, still giving the service a chance after getting burned with the Blogger API fiasco, "Hey, make sure you tell me 'blah' at 2 PM." At 3 o'clock, I got the message, right on time, if anybody was counting EST.

So unless IMified keeps their servers in Arizona or parts of Indiana, their clocks are wrong.

Points off.